Greedy Goblin

Friday, July 29, 2016

"All the real players spent all their money on gear"

This is a common argument against my crafting, trading and worker based income in Black Desert. A claim that other people (the grinders) make more money, they just can't prove it with a #1 wealth badge because they spent it all on gear.

No, I won't come with the obvious reply "screenshot or didn't happen". Instead I'd like to emphasize that this is the point of using crafting, trading and AFK farms instead of grinding. Grinding needs gear to be effective. And levels, but that's "easy" to get. You can't grind as a low level or with low gear. Especially as anyone can kill you to take your spot. Sure, you can run back again and again until he turns criminal, but that's lot of waste of time. This is the same as the WoW gearing: you farm gear so you can kill bigger bosses so you can farm more gear.

On the other hand the industrial income sources need no gear, so you can make stupid amount of money even before reaching level 50. Here gear is simple vanity buy which you can delay until the price goes down. It will go down, as many people replace their normal gear to boss-drop gear, despite only a few percent increase of stats, putting their normal gear for sale. Also, the enhancement materials keep coming into the economy, while demand decreases as the most "dedicated" players finished gearing. For them it's a must: the faster they get gear, the faster they can farm silver. For crafters there is no hurry.

This should be a very good reason for new players to pick the industrial route: instead of competing with the already geared grinders, they could use the grinders as gear source. Instead, they want to follow the "normal route" and then whine that they can "never catch up", which is factually true: you will never catch up if you do the same as someone who is better geared for the job and always have better output. But economy is already a catchup mechanism, as the existing rich pays more for the same product than the people did at the start. I mean the grinders won't care if a well-bred horse or some consumables is expensive as they can afford it, providing income to the horse breeders and consumable crafters. You just have to look for professions that cooperates with them instead of competes.

9 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Do you have a counter for the moral high ground argument that will come next? Majority of people will still refuse to consider industry because grinding is "real work" while trading is "not playing the game," the IRL equivalent being the boss who "doesn't do anything" while the employee works hard for his paycheck. Some people have enough self-awareness to realise it's their choice to give up greater income for less responsibility, but for those who can see the light, it's extremely difficult to get them to fight social presure and shake those ideals.

Well, that argument works for trading (buying and selling), but what about crafting armor, weapons or carts? That's work. You can literally see your worker going out to get materials and your avatar processing it.

BDO is especially good field to fight against sociality because it limits pure market flipping and focuses more on positive sum business.

Gevlon is spot on, and this follows the "Pareto Principle", which is a nearly universal truth.

In the beginning, the grinder spends 20% of his effort getting 80% of the result... but then the law of diminishing return kicks in, and without the tools or realization that he's executing a huge malinvestment of his time, continues to grind that gear, selling the old, now "worthless" gear to recoup the previous 20% effort while bashing his head against the new cost of 80% to do the same thing.

The trader, on the other hand, makes money today to buy that 80% effective gear for the 20% it cost the grinder. And in so doing, is NEVER in the malinvestment range of investing over 20%. There is always another who will step up and pay that rent for him because there is always another who is in the malinvestment range and needs to dump their old, 20% gear.

For crafters it is actually detrimental to buy gear before they have enough cash. You need money to make money and all that. Having a decent amount of cash on hand allows for more crafting/workshops etc and reduces the actual time needed for upkeep because you can buy larger stockpiles of goods at once.

I was wondering what do you do with energy on alts? right now I try to roll for professional/artisan workers. but all the good nodes I have are already with artisans. So soon I really don't know what to do with alt-energy.sharp crystal drops from gathering do simply not exist for my account besides gathering is a waste of time. npc amnity is a waste of time. alchemy/cooking need to be ridiculously skilled to bother dumping energy into it. Not doing anything with it seems to be a waste.

I diagree. Node war is for me and many others is the end game. And having silver in the bank wont help me winning nods. Gear is certainly not only needed gor grinder. You can effectively grind on sub 500 mil silver gear.

Crafting/processing does actually have "gear" - Silver embroidered xxxx. +5 (which is max) on those can be annoyingly difficult to get, success rates seem low, but the bonuses are rather significant to the point that everyone who does any of the life skills more than casually SHOULD get those clothes and enchant them high ASAP.